Recently I took part in Startup Weekend Buenos Aires. It works just like most hackathons:
New friends: Caro, Eze, Gus and me
- You give a one minute pitch on Friday evening.
- Winners put together a team.
- You work with your team on Saturday and Sunday to launch a product.
- Demo for the judges.
- Prizes. Beer. Sleep.
On the Friday I spoke no Spanish and had no idea how to write an iPhone app. By Sunday I still spoke no Spanish, but I’d built my first app and it won second prize!
How did I learn Objective-C in a weekend? I didn’t. I wrote it in C#.
I downloaded Xamarin MonoTouch onto my MacBook Pro and was following the ‘Hello World’ tutorial within an hour. The MonoTouch documentation is very clear and the samples are very useful. Very soon I had a multiple screen application built, including capturing an image from the camera.
Monotouch makes mobile development really easy for C# programmers. It’s also cross-platform so you can re-use big chunks of your code when you write the Android version.